– Simplifying Your Cloud –

As we get into 2019 we start to think about this year’s ‘Azure Global Bootcamp’ – a yearly event where Microsoft brings together user groups and communities from around the world in a day of learning around the Microsoft cloud platform. This year’s event is on Saturday April 27th. The Northern Azure User Group (one … Continue reading 2019 Azure Global Bootcamp

As you start to bring more services into Azure, expanding from pre-production and test workloads into the reals of hosting live, production environments and the number of teams and people involved in keeping the environment running grows you’ll want to make sure you have the right policies and governance in place but keeping in mind … Continue reading Azure Management Groups

If, like me you’re a bit of an Apple Fan Boy and prefer to use a Mac / MacBook for your daily machine you’ll want to make sure you get the Azure CLI installed. The CLI is a command-line tool allowing you to manage your Azure resources from code built upon Python. So why CLI … Continue reading Azure CLI on MacOS

One of the many announcements from this weeks Ignite 2018 conference (you can found a detailed look at all the Azure announcements here) is the Azure Monitor for VMs. Azure Monitor (currently released in ‘Preview’) will provide an in-depth review of performance, health and even dependencies all in a easy to access view. Azure monitor … Continue reading Azure Monitor

If like me you’ve been spending all of your time this week just trying to keep on top of the huge number of Azure announcements (never mind all the others) then you may find this - Microsoft’s 'Book of News’ a handy thing to have a look at. A PDF with all the announcements with … Continue reading Book of News – Ignite 2018

It was only a month or so ago that I was writing about the new ‘Standard SSD’ offering in Azure, a disk that offers the same reliable availability and improved latency of the Premium SSD disk but kept the same IOPS and throughput as a standard HHD. Well, with the plethora of announcements coming out … Continue reading Ultra SSD Disks in Azure

Turning your unused VMs off has long been a cost saver, you only pay for the storage when the VM is turned off and not for the running cost of the VM itself. Microsoft has for a while had the ability to shutdown the VM on a schedule but offered no real solution on how … Continue reading Power Management in Azure

A while ago now I covered Azure’s Reserved Instance (RI) feature and how its use can dramatically reduce the TCO for your Azure VMs. Well this useful feature just got even better! Microsoft are introducing ‘size flexibility for Azure Reserved Instances’ With traditional RI’s you chose the VM instance size (D4s_v3 for example) and how … Continue reading Size flexibility for Azure Reserved Instances

If you would like to start deploying and configuring your environment via code but not sure where to start, or how to structure and write a JSON template then you’re in luck! Microsoft has a whole host of Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates on Github for you to explore and use as you need. And … Continue reading Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates

For this blog post I thought I’d go back to basics, keep out of the tech and ask the age old question of “Why are we going to cloud?” Overcoming the resistance from various people within he business can, on occasion be just as, if not more difficult than the technical challenges you will face. … Continue reading The value of cloud?